The music labels are at it again, this time with all-new but oh-so-familiar dizzying heights of greed. This time: Apple wants to add the ability to purchase downloadable music over the iPhone via a 3G broadband connection. The stupid part: the music labels want to charge more for that.

You got it: download a song via iTunes on your computer, you pay one price; download the same song on your iPhone, you pay a premium.

Why? Because they can. At least with ringtones, there’s a premise, albeit a phony one, for charging extra: the music is used in a significantly different way. Your phone rings, it uses the song–and if I understand things right, you can set a different song depending on who calls. It’s still highway robbery, as the spiffy part is in the software modification to link caller ID to change the sound file used to designate a ring, not in the actual music file itself, which you might already own anyway. But the music labels demand the money, so you pay more, even though it’s only a partial use of the song–and even though Apple charges an extra 99 cents for the ringtone, that is actually a low price: ringtones can cost a few bucks on other services.

But for downloading a song over your phone you pay extra? That’s beyond greedy, it’s flat-out indescribable. There is not even a phony premise for charging more for songs you download over a telephone connection, none. The only thing I can think of is that you might get the sudden urge to hear a song so badly that you can’t wait to get to a computer. And when was the last time that happened?

No wonder Apple is fighting it: the premium would reduce the feature to a seldom-used luxury, as most people would see it for what it is: a rip-off. A few people would use it, paying the extra money to look or feel cool, but it would probably fall off rapidly once they realized that others were laughing at them.

I know that the idea in economics is to charge what the market will bear, but there is a more fundamental principle, one might even call it a moral one: you charge for services rendered. If you do not extra work, you are not paid for it. Yes, I know, not the real world, but the moral pricing principle has an effect on what people perceive. Like charging more for bottled tap water than you pay for gasoline, or paying more for a black MacBook than a white MacBook, you’re paying more for an idea than for actual resources or effort. In some cases, it works, but even when it does, people who see through it recognize the dishonesty. Downloading music over a cell phone costs the record companies not one fraction of a penny more than it does over a computer connection. They just see the opportunity to charge more, figure people are stupid enough to do it, so there it is. Economics in action.

Me? Don’t ever count on me using that service. And though I wouldn’t mind using certain ringtones, I’m not going to do it if I have to pay more; instead, I’ll jailbreak the phone and use the music I already own in any damned way I please. As far as I’m concerned, premiums for ringtones and cell phone downloads are a sucker tax. Some people say that lottery tickets are a tax on stupidity, but at least with lottery tickets, you’re buying the ability to add a bit of excitement to your fantasies of wealth; with cell phone music premiums, you’re just a sucker.